In Hurricane's Aftermath, a Blowout Portfolio

Companies that help people rebuild from Charley's devastation should show big profits.

In neighboring Lee County, officials said 250,000 buildings were damaged. Wal-Mart ( WMT) said on Monday that the hurricane had forced it to close 75 shores between Fort Myers and Daytona Beach on Aug. 13, trimming sales for the month. But on the other hand, the retailer reported brisk business in resupplying homeowners who lost clothes, electronics and much more to the winds.

To determine the best potential trades in this environment, you could drive around the state and make a lot of guesses about what would work. Or you could fire up the MSN Money Stock Screener , ask it for a list of all the companies based in Florida, and focus on the ones that are the highest ranked in the MSN StockScouter rating system and have already earned the affection of early buyers.

We'll go with the latter option for now and rely on readers to supply accounts to make up for the lack of an eyewitness visit. If you have an opinion, email me and put COMMENT in the subject line.

To search for stocks in a single state in StockScouter, make the first criterion "Company Basics/State," the operator "=" and the value "FL," or Florida. If you click "Run Search" now, you'll see all 250 stocks in the database that have headquarters in that state.

Because we're looking for relatively large, tradeable companies regarded highly by Scouter, next set the Screener to search only for stocks with market capitalizations greater than $100 million, prices greater than $3, average daily volume greater than 25,000 shares per day and StockScouter ratings greater than 7. Also set the Screener to "display only" the companies' industry, price ratios and recent performance returns.

Next you'll need to click File/Export/Export to Excel to automatically output the choices to Excel for further study. Sort the results by Industry Name and delete all of the companies that are unlikely to have anything to do with the rebuilding effort, such as biotechs, defense contractors and cruise-ship operators.